Obscurity, verbosity, and pretentiousness are to be avoided; unusual words are to be used only when they aid clarity and prevent the aforementioned faults. For Aslell, women's rheloric should focus on the art of conversation, us both Sutherland and Renaissance scholar Jane Donawerth have argued. This is women's proper rhetori­cal sphere, different from but in no way inferior to the public sphere in which men use oratory.

My mind immediately went to gossip and how the exchange/passing along of information/knowledge between women has been through this "proper rhetorical sphere" -- (private) conversations.

The way obscurity is used here versus how it's used by Locke is also very interesting and very, very gendered.

On the net, you have public, or you have secrets. The private intermediate sphere, with its careful buffering. is shattered. E-mails are forwarded verbatim. IRC transcripts, with throwaway comments, are preserved forever. You talk to your friends online, you talk to the world.

The problem here is one (ironically) of register. In the real world, we have conversations in public, in private, and in secret. All three are quite separate. The public is what we say to a crowd; the private is what we chatter amongst ourselves, when free from the demands of the crowd; and the secret is what we keep from everyone but our confidant. Secrecy implies intrigue, implies you have something to hide. Being private doesn’t. You can have a private gathering, but it isn’t necessarily a secret. All these conversations have different implications, different tones.

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OER matters not because textbooks matter. OER matters because it highlights an example of how something central to our public missions, the transfer of our foundational disciplinary knowledge from one generation of scholars to the next, has been co-opted by private profit. And OER is not a solution, but a systemic shift from private to public architecture in how we deliver learning.

I love this framing of OER as public infrastructure to facilitate the transfer of knowledge. I think it is not only generational, but also more broadly to the public. OER use is not limited to just students within our institutions, but are available freely and openly more broadly to the public. To anyone. I think we need to make that point more widely known. Every OER that is made freely available is making knowledge more open to not only students in our institutions, but to anyone, anywhere. It truly is "public" infrastructure.

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This is unsettling. Why are the world’s greatest public technocrats also its greatest private technophobes? It seemed as if they were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: never get high on your own supply.

Court repudiated the notion that a person who places documents with a bank would, as a result, forsake an expectation of confidentiality. In the view of the Court, even if the documents cease to be at a place other than in the custody and control of the customer, privacy attaches to persons and not places and hence the protection of privacy is not diluted

2 important observations

recognition of privacy attached to persons and and not places (moving beyond a propertarian view of privacy)

sharing of information does not lead to forsaking a reasonable expectation of privacy. Without reference, repudiation of third party doctrine. privacy not quivalent with secrecy.

If the reason for protecting privacy is the dignity of the individual, the rationale for its existence does not cease merely because the individual has to interact with others in the public arena. The extent to which an individual expects privacy in a public street may be different from that which she expects in the sanctity of the home

Not surprh,ingly, as women's education improved, women increasingly began to speak in public :md to reflect on their rhetorical practices.

From the intro to Mary Astell's section: "For Astell, women's rhetoric should focus on the art of conversation... This is women's proper rhetorical sphere, different from but in no way inferior to the public sphere in which men use oratory" (845).

In what ways does this new focus on women's public oratory affect Astell's insistence on private, domestic, and/or conversational discourse as sites of rhetorical power? Especially as we consider this part from Mary Beard's lecture: "In the early fourth century BC Aristophanes devoted a whole comedy to the ‘hilarious’ fantasy that women might take over running the state. Part of the joke was that women couldn’t speak properly in public – or rather, they couldn’t adapt their private speech (which in this case was largely fixated on sex) to the lofty idiom of male politics."

Where academic Twitter once seemed quietly parochial and collegial almost to the point of excess, it is now thrust into the messy, contested business of being truly open to the public.

is being in the public the problem, or is it the change of the tone or format of discourse?

fully public honest but still civil discussions aiming at making a case, creating more awareness, finding solutions, or trying to understand, clarify, show genuine interest .... is better than a public fight .. right? or am I misunderstanding this?

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This later formulation points to the beginning of an important transformation of the public sphere as it moved from being a space of public authority to one in which private citizens came together to form publics capable of holding public authorities accountable.

This is a key point, so I want to make sure I understand it correctly. Is the claim that a 'public world of readers' is already a transition away from an earlier conception of the public sphere as simply the site of dissemination for authoritarian mandates?

How does the private/public distinction function when it comes to private citizens forming publics that hold public authorities accountable?